In what may well be one the fastest renewals in television history, Netflix original production Stranger Things was officially renewed for a second season in less than six weeks since its first broadcast. Creators the Matt and Ross Duffer have promised that the new season will have ” a lot of new and interesting dynamics” that weren’t included in the first season. Though it won’t be out until 2017, the first run was such a compelling piece of television that fans are already clamouring for more information about what they can expect.

Though the first season was fairly well wrapped up by the end, it definitely had enough mystery left that a second season could take any number of directions and be just as exciting. The creators have hinted that this was done on purpose, that both the Duffer brothers and producer Shawn Levy would love to linger a little longer over the story and characters they’ve created.

It has been confirmed that the second season will centre around the same primary protagonists, but the team behind it consider the continuation to be more like a “sequel” than a second season. Set around a year after we last saw them, the characters will be facing new problems, new tensions, new difficulties, rather than a continuation of their old issuues. Hopefully it will keep all the same dynamic qualities that made it so addicting the first time round.

It has now been revealed that, joining the familiar faces we fell in love with in season one, there will be a number of new characters for us to meet.

The first is a pre-adolescent girl, around the same age as Mike as his pals, called Max. She is boyish and confident and eschews the bikes favoured by the other kids in favour of a skateboard to carry her around. It could be a coincidence, but some have already drawn parallels between her name and the title of season 2’s premier episode: “MadMax”.

Though we know far less about him as a character, we do know that Max has an older brother, Billy. Aside from “muscular and confident” and driver of a Camaro, not much else has been revealed yet.

Perhaps even more mysterious still is Roman, a thirty-something character who is currently being cast as gender-neutral to whoever might show up and make it their own. The right actor could come along and change the very essence of this character if they were talented enough.

In typical Stranger Things style, it’s given us just the right amount of information to intrigue us and to keep us hooked and eager for the “sequel”.